Category: Edible Plants

Community Gardening / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Organic Vegetable Gardening / Pollinators / Vegetable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Bill Dichtel

What Is Going on at the Historic Triangle Learning Garden?

  The Historic Triangle Learning Garden is one of many projects led by members of the James City County/Williamsburg Master Gardeners.  It is located  right behind the CDR building and next door to Waller Mill Elementary School, at 312 Waller Mill Road. Originally known as “Incredible Edibles,” the project changed its name to the Historic Triangle Learning Garden in 2021 to reflect a broader range of interests, including growing flowers, supporting pollinators, and practicing other aspects of organic gardening, in...

Edible Plants / Food Forest / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Invasive Plants / Larval Host Plants / Native Plants / Water Wise / Weeds / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

What is a Weed?

A family of rabbits gathers each evening at dusk to nibble their way through the clover and creeping Charlie that populate our front ‘lawn.’  They prefer to nibble plants that we don’t cultivate and won’t miss.  A motley mix of volunteer species, interspersed with a few grasses, grow in the open space between the patio and hedge.  While we call it a ‘bee lawn,’ others might say our lawn is infested with weeds. What is a Weed? Any plant growing...

Animal repellant products / Beneficial Insects / Container Gardens / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Tender Perennials / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Designing With Lemon Scented Plants

  Picnics with citronella candles, lemon scented furniture polish and sweet tea with lemons all recall happy childhood memories.   Fragrance has a profound ability to create or shift a mood, to trigger memories and create new ones.  Just as cinnamon evokes the holidays; crisp, cool lemon is a summertime fragrance. Most lemon scented plants thrive in warm climates.  Lemon trees, Citrus limon, are hardy only to Zone 8.  Originally native to Asia, they spread throughout the ancient world wherever the...

Beneficial Insects / Container Gardens / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Larval Host Plants / Native Plants / Perennial Care / Poisonous Plants / Summer Color Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Designing Plantings to Host Butterflies and Moths

  A friend was excited to buy milkweed plants at a WBG plant sale several years ago. They aren’t easy to find commercially, and few people raise them from seed.  When I saw her again a few weeks later, I inquired about how her plants were doing. “Oh, I must have done something wrong. They’re not looking so good.  Most of the leaves have disappeared,” she replied.     I quickly reassured her that it was unlikely she had done...

Carbon Garden / Edible Plants / Ferns / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Larval Host Plants / Native Plants / Permaculture / Propagation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Fabulous Ferns for Every Garden

Why do gardeners use ferns in their designs?  Ferns form an important layer in the landscape, especially in shady gardens.   Peaceful and calming, they grow lushly, providing both structure and interesting texture.   Some may dismiss ferns as uniformly green, but many varieties provide vibrant color.   Ferns make excellent ground cover, specimen and filler plants.  While some grow as single fronds arising from a rhizome, or in small vase-shaped clusters, many ferns spread to form larger and larger clumps over time.

Ferns are very easy to grow, needing little care. They rarely have any sort of disease or pest, and neither chemicals nor machines are needed to care for them.  All types of ferns are perennials and grow better with the passing years.

Animal repellant products / Container Gardens / Deer / Edible Plants / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Planting a ‘Food Forest’ at Home for Sustainable Harvests

For most of human history, families relied on gathering foods growing in their environment for some portion of their diet.  And many of these delicious and nutritious foods grow on long-lived trees or shrubs, from persistent perennials, or from plants that readily self-seed.  This very sustainable form of agriculture allows for food production with few inputs of water, fertilizer or labor, once the plants establish.  Perhaps most importantly, there is minimal disturbance to the soil’s ecosystem.

Animal repellant products / Beneficial Insects / Birds / Bulb Gardening / Container Gardens / Crafting With Plants / Edible Plants / Evergreen Perennials / Ferns / Flowering Shrubs / Fragrant Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Lepidoptera / Native Plants / Ornamental Shrubs / Perennial Care / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Making Container Gardens for Wildlife

  An older woman made her way slowly through the aisles of the garden center’s outdoor display area, leaning heavily on a cane.  As I turned, hands loaded with small pots, she was behind me.  She smiled and asked whether I had seen any bee balm on the display of herbs I’d been scanning. We began to chat, and it turned out that she wanted to attract hummingbirds to the balcony of her apartment.  Someone had told her that hummingbirds...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Native Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Bringing Birds to the Garden

  Do you feed the birds? Most of us gardeners do. Unless you are protecting a crop of blueberries or blackberries, you probably enjoy the energy and joy birds bring to the garden with their antics and songs. Birds also vacuum up thousands of flying, crawling, and burrowing insects. Even hummingbirds eat an enormous number of insects as they fly around from blossom to blossom seeking sweet nectar. Birds are an important part of a balanced garden community. We have...

Animal repellant products / Birds / Deer / Edible Plants / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Larval Host Plants / Lepidoptera / Native Plants / Permaculture / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Who Is Welcome to Dine?

A Black Swallowtail butterfly feeds on Verbena bonariensis . When planning your garden and buying plants, is your first consideration who, or what, might eat them? If you are planting fruit trees, tomato vines, or salad greens you’re likely planning to share the fruits of your labor and investment with family and friends. Some friends of mine garden in a community garden, where much of the produce raised is donated to our local FISH organization. But food crops aside, when...

Animal repellant products / Deer / Edible Plants / Fragrant Plants / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Poisonous Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

But Will Deer Eat It?

The lady checking out in front of me at the garden center had two cute little pots of ‘polka dot plant,’ Hypoestes phyllostachya, and she had a single question for the clerk: “Will deer eat it?” For those of us living among free-roaming herds of deer, that is always the question! Do deer graze in your garden? It seems that ever-growing herds of deer continue moving into more and more areas across the United States. Even suburbs and small towns...